May not duration be represented as distinctly as space? – geography and the visualisation of time in the early eighteenth century

Boyd Davis, Stephen,
2015,
Book Section,
May not duration be represented as distinctly as space? – geography and the visualisation of time in the early eighteenth century
In: Beck, David, (ed.)
Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe.
Warwick Series in the Humanities, 5
.
Pickering and Chatto, London, pp. 119-137.
ISBN 978 1 84893 518 1

The eighteenth century saw the creation of the modern timeline, a diagrammatic representation of historical time that has since become ubiquitous. The present chapter identifies early examples of the genre and discusses their relationship to other forms of knowledge, analysing the artefacts themselves and the contemporary explanations published by their authors. It extends previous work on the influence of mechanical metaphors and models of cognition to focus here on the complementary influence of geography. Geography and chronology were presented as equal contributors to history from at least the sixteenth century, but what was new in the eighteenth was the proposition that chronology could itself become a kind of geography, offering the possibility of ‘cartographies of time’. The chapter traces the changing relationship between the two disciplines, set in their cultural context.